Danny romine powell biography of michael
Our Prince of Scribes
Writers Remember Pat Conroy
Writers Remember Pat Conroy
An illuminating collection of essays honoring the literary legacy of Pat Conroy
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New York Times best-selling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans numbering in the millions, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year writing life. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary life in and well beyond the American South.
Conroy’s was a messy fellowship of people from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he’d left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Pulitzer Prize winners Rick Bragg and Kathleen Parker; Grammy winners Barbra Streisand and Janis Ian; Lillian Smith Award winners Anthony Grooms and Mary Hood; National Book Award winner Nikky Finney; James Beard Foundation Award winners Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart; a corps of New York Times best-selling authors, including Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; longtime Conroy friends Bernie Schein, Cliff Graubart, John Warley, and Walter Edgar; Pat’s students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more.
Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a vibrant, multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on the writer and the man. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays in Our Prince of Scribes wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to
Dannye Gibson Powell, eclectic journalist, acclaimed poet and all-embracing matriarch, died Thursday, October 10, 2024 at her longtime home in Dilworth. She had lung cancer. She was 83.
Over four decades at the Charlotte Observer, Dannye Romine Powell — her byline — was book editor, restaurant critic and local-front columnist.
Her incisive Q-and-A’s with such authors as Walker Percy, Maya Angelou and Eudora Welty were collected in her “Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers.” She contributed the Charlotte chapter in “John Mariani’s Coast to Coast Dining Guide.” As local columnist she covered the murder trials of Susan Smith, Michael Peterson and Josh Griffin.
Her predecessor on the local front, the revered Kays Gary, once admitted to an editor that he had underestimated “this woman Romine.” “No tricks. No contrivances. No preachments. Just powerful parables about real people…. More than any other one person Dannye reflects the best in a family newspaper.”
Despite her overflowing clip file she never considered herself a true “newspaper gal,” an admiring designation she bestowed on friends such as Karen Garloch and Pam Kelley. “For a while I couldn’t walk on that side of the newsroom,” she once recalled. “But then [reporter] Ronnie Glassberg told me he liked my hair.”
Her first published poem appeared in the Paris Review in 1974, catching the eye of copy desk chief Luisita Lopez and leading to her hiring as book editor. That was her dream job — everything else she did at the paper she had to be forcefully drafted for. She continued to publish poetry, winning a National Endowment for the Arts grant and residencies at Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, which had turned down as too modest her application to wait tables.
“At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home” received the Miller Williams First Book Award from the University of Arkan
Dannye Romine Powell and Her 45 Years as a Player in Charlotte’s Literary Scene
Shortly after I moved to Charlotte in the summer of 1984, I subscribed to The Charlotte Observer. At the time, Dannye Romine Powell served as the book editor for the paper. Back in those days, the paper published a two-page book section every Sunday. It included original book reviews, interviews with authors, and news about local literary events. As a regular reader of the paper’s book section, I got to know Dannye through her writing and through seeing her at book signings and other literary events in the community. I soon came to see Dannye as a key player in Charlotte’s literary scene.
Dannye made her debut on the Charlotte literary scene in 1975 when she became the book editor for The Charlotte Observer. She remained the paper’s book editor until 1992. In this role, she often interviewed Southern authors. She decided to collect these interviews in a book titled Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, which came out in 1995. In addition to her interview book, Dannye has published five poetry collections, two of which have won the the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award for best book by a North Carolina poet. Her most recent collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, just came out from Press 53. For more information about this collection, please click on the following link: https://www.press53.com/dannye-romine-powell
I recently contacted Dannye and asked for her reflections on her long career as a Charlotte journalist, columnist, and poet. Here is her response:
In the beginning – at least in the beginning of my tenure as book editor of the Charlotte Observer in 1975 – there was Charleen. Nobody said, “Charleen who?” Everybody knew. The ebullient, charismatic Charleen Whisnant was all the literati this town needed. She Dannye Powell’s poems are insightful and smart, and her gift for the perfect metaphor continues to feel effortless and natural. She finds humor in some of the bumps life amply provides, so that even poems dealing with difficult moments and tough issues leave the reader feeling uplifted. —Susan Ludvigson, author of Wave as If You Can See Me As always, Dannye Romine Powell's highly individual way of looking at the world yields poems that delight and surprise, never flinching at painful or complicated subjects but continuously revealing strange and unexpected truths. This book is a treasure. —Patricia Hooper, author of Wild Persistence A new collection of poetry by Dannye Romine Powell remains cause for celebration; and her latest, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, underscores her abiding reputation as a poet of breathtaking candor and precision, the consummate craftswoman, who painstakingly parses syllables into words as if sifting for gold. These yearning, often prayerful, poems are laced with shimmer, incandescence—sometimes blinding—moments of recognition and epiphany that inform every chiseled line Powell commits to paper. Above all, her work is intricately exacting. She gets things right: the truth, the light, how we say things, how we don’t say things, the nuanced choreography of imperceptibly monumental moments. Yet, make no mistake: the poet desists sentimentality, as she does so fiercely at every turn in this amazingly beautiful and courageous volume. This is a very important book by a very important poet at the summit of her powers. —Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of The 13th Sunday after PentecostDannye Romine Powell
Praise for Dannye Romine Powell